In Praise of Messy Lives

Essays

When Katie Roiphe was 5, her class took a ferryboat ride to Staten Island. She'd been anticipating the excursion for weeks, and yet, when the wind was blowing from the East River, the kids out on the boardwalk "holding hands in twos, like the little girls in the Madeline books," she told the teacher she had a stomachache and went home instead. "It was my first purely anarchic moment of self-sabotage," Roiphe reports in her new collection of essays, "In Praise of Messy Lives."

For a certain kind of writer, the anecdote might presage a lifetime of self-destructive episodes that she is attempting to understand and overcome. For the unsentimental Roiphe, this bit of childhood perversity appears to be almost a point of pride. The essay in which it appears, "Beautiful Boy, Warm Night," tells the story of a college friend whom Roiphe betrayed. One summer night she slept with the boyfriend of her friend Stella, "one of the few girls at school that I could talk to."

At the time, Roiphe "felt the freeing thrill of ruining everything." Then she tried unsuccessfully to win Stella back by writing "elaborately contrite letters" and by enlisting her in an examination of the incident, as if it would help "to take the whole thing apart like a car motor, to take out the pieces and look at them together."

As Roiphe revisits the event decades later, it's not so much with remorse as with fascination. The piece is less an apology than a provocation. Though she admits to behaving stupidly, selfishly, hurtfully, there's no moral to the story. If Stella were to read the piece, Roiphe concludes, she would see it as "just another way of making this about me, rather than her," of "stealing the boy all over again."

This is the sort of thing that makes some people angry with Roiphe. Not the stealing of men (at least as far as I know), but the perceived betrayal of women - in much greater numbers than one ex-friend named Stella. Roiphe's first book, "The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus," skewered feminist responses to allegations of date rape and sexual harassment on college campuses in the late '80s and early '90s.

"It is out of the deep belief that some feminisms are better than others that I have written this book," Roiphe noted in her introduction. To her detractors, Roiphe's variety amounted to antifeminism. If, after the Stella incident, "there were whole tables in the dining hall [Roiphe] had to avoid," that was only a small-scale precursor to the kind of ire she's provoked since.

"In Praise of Messy Lives" is bound to rattle some readers, and that's part of its appeal and its strength. In an essay titled "Is Maureen Dowd Necessary?" Roiphe sees the New York Times columnist, with her book "Are Men Necessary?" as complicit in an unfortunate feminist tradition: "a reliance on easy aphorisms, and the schematic worldview" they imply (think, "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle").

Roiphe suggests that adored, youngish male novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers are wimps when it comes to writing about sex. She argues that incest in fiction has become a "paralyzed literary convention," that it "all comes to sound the same - the stock plot of a culture obsessed with sexual abuse."

In relation to the immense popularity of the novel "Fifty Shades of Grey," she proposes that women's attraction to stories of sexual submission might offer "an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality." As for "this particular watered-down, skinny-vanilla-latte version of sadomasochism," the only shocking thing Roiphe finds is that "millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level."

But Roiphe's collection is not all derision and send-up. She energetically celebrates Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Germaine Greer, John Updike, "Mad Men," the children's book author Margaret Wise Brown and a dominatrix who makes fetish films. She writes eloquently about the need for mothers to preserve their identities as women in an obsessively child-centered culture, to keep tending to the "healthy, worldly, engaged, and preening self."

And in a passionate defense of single motherhood, she suggests that because, for single mothers like herself, having a baby "is not necessarily the obvious or normal or predictable or easy thing to do," that makes it "all the more of a deep and consuming commitment."

When Roiphe was unmarried and pregnant, a friend advised her to terminate her pregnancy, proposing, "You could just wait and have a regular baby!" One can imagine that friend picking up this book, seeing his words in print and cringing. Hopefully, rather than shaking his fist at Roiphe, he will make a mental note. A baby is a baby. We have regular verbs and regular sport coats, but when it comes to people, "regular" doesn't apply.